The Written Word

January 14, 2004/

Commit yourself to lifelong learning. The most valuable asset you’ll ever have is your mind and what you put into it. ~Brian Tracy

I do a lot of reading every day, both online and printed material (books, for those who have never experienced one – you know who you are). In the mornings, I go through a fairly extensive list of mainly tech, design/dev or business related sites: news, blogs, zines. My work bookmarks are here. I don’t go through all of them every day, of course – but this is the type of thing that I look at. (Admittedly, there are also a lot of journals that I also go through on a daily basis, which isn’t strictly work-related.)

The world of technology moves at lightspeed. New programming languages, methodologies and technology rise and fall, always supplanted by something new. I think the most important thing that anyone working in a tech- or internet-related field can do is stay up to date. You need to educate yourself on an ongoing basis, or your skills will quickly become out of date and unmarketable in a fast-changing environment. And so, catching up on internet, e-commerce and web development news headlines is the first thing I do at my desk every morning. This allows me to:

-Be conversant with news and trends in my field.
-Gauge which new technologies and trends are going to be important in the future: to my job, to maintaining and upgrading my skillset, and also important for the companies that I work for and design sites for.

It takes perhaps a half hour to an hour every morning. Picking up new techniques and new skills takes longer, of course…but everything I learn hones and expands my skills, and makes me more valuable to the company I work for, and also more marketable.

How do you keep up to date? What sites do you find to be of greatest use?